@AscendancyZine Actually, the screen shot and the description of your business were what I needed. I’m going to give you a possible work-around, as well as a suggestion for you to submit to the Square Online team. First…..
Currently, there is no way to force online checkout to collect an email address. The phone number is required, as you see, but that might be a good thing for the work-around I’m aging to suggest. Before I get into that, Square has a Feature Request Board for us to submit ideas for features. I recommend that you go there and ask them to give us an online checkout setting to require email addresses. When you do that, please post the link to it as a reply here and I’ll definitely support/upvote it.
Next, you said you sell digital goods. If you are at all interested, there are third-party apps in the Square App Marketplace that help you automatically fulfill digital goods. I’m betting that they require email addresses for obvious reasons. The best one I’ve found is SendOwl. It has a monthly subscription fee plus a per-order fulfillment fee, but to my way of thinking having your fulfillment being automatic is more than worth that. I’m just putting that out there. Just build their fees into your prices.
Lastly, my work-around, just in case. You can create a modifier set that is type Text Modifier. You can attach this to all of your items and require customers to enter it. Of course, there are a couple of minor drawbacks:
- Text Modifier boxes do NOT verify that there is a valid email address. But in this day of auto-fill that might not be a problem.
- There is not automatic “reenter email address for verification” function. If you want that, you’d have to have TWO text modifier boxes, and it still won’t compare them. Such is the nature of work-arounds. This is why having a phone number is good. You can always call the customer if they don’t match and verify.
Anyway, if you do this, you can export a CSV of your item details each day, fix whatever email address issues crop up and then send the products. It’s not perfect, but it is very workable to my way of thinking. Personally, I’d use SendOwl, but of course that is up to you.
I hope all of that helps. If you have more questions, fire away! And don’t forget to submit the feature request and post the link to it here.
Chip A.
Square Expert & Innovator and member of the Square Champions group. (But NOT a Square employee, just a seller like you)
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